Beauty and the Beast
by corendel
Summary: PostWar Harry receives a pleasant visitor one day.


Disclaimer: I own nothing. Please don't sue.

Harry James Potter was not a normal person. Well, besides the fact that he was a wizard, he was also the Boy-Who-Lived, or rather now, the Boy-Who-Conquered. After having defeated Voldemort, Harry really saw nothing left to live for. It was not that he wanted to die, for even with all its faults, Harry did enjoy being alive, but he was lost. All his life, he felt as if he'd been somehow training to defeat the Dark Lord, and now that Voldemort was no more than a memory, he didn't know what he wanted to do.

Well, of course, that was yesterday. This morning Harry woke up wide-eyed and ready for the world. Well, ready to repopulate the world with green-eyed little monsters that could be the torment of potions teachers everywhere. The war had left Harry scarred, if not physically then definitely mentally, and he never though he would find a woman who would be able to put up with his darker side and would be willing to give him the family he always wanted, well, at least a woman who saw him as Harry, and not the Boy-Who-Conquered, the most powerful wizard of modern times.

After Sirius's death, Harry unleashed his Slytherin side. Voldemort was trying to kill him, and although Harry didn't put as much faith in the prophecy as Dumbledore, he did realize that Voldemort did, and he knew he would have to prepare. Of course, Harry knew two things, one being that no matter how hard he trained, he would never be able to defeat Tom Riddle in a magical duel, Voldemort just had too much experience. Power was not an issue, Harry knew. He was after all, marked as Voldemort's equal. Harry might be as powerful as him, but never as experienced.

Second, Harry knew that Dumbledore was insane. How could love be a power? Sure, love was a force, and it could cause some people to do crazy things, but it wasn't a power. And how could his mother's love save him? Countless mothers throughout time had sacrificed their lives for their children, so what made his mother different? Most likely, Harry reasoned, his mother's sacrifice was part of some ritual she used to protect him. Harry had spent some of his free time during second year, when the entire school was avoiding anyways, looking into the library for protection rituals. Although he found nothing that could stop the killing curse, he did find several that offered varying levels of protection by using animal sacrifices. And so while Harry thanked his mother dearly for modifying whatever ritual she performed on him into using herself as a human sacrifice, he knew that love was not the power the Dark Lord knew not. No, that power was the retired MI-5 agent that moved into Number 8 Privet Drive at the beginning of summer.

John, as he called himself, originally hired Harry to do some manual labor on his house. Actually, it was more like Uncle Vernon volunteered Harry, and then kept his pay for himself. But nevertheless, Harry found himself spending most of everyday at John's house, doing chores such as laying tile and painting walls. Serving as the Dursley's house-elf for ten straight years of his life prepared Harry for this mission, and he succeeded in record time. As fate would have it though, Voldemort decided to feel a little vindictive on Harry's last day, and just as he was about to report in to John to announce his completion, Harry collapsed on the floor clutching his scar in pain.

The retired MI-5 agent saw this of course, and, being trained for years in things so innumerable that the mind can't even comprehend it, John did not believe Harry's reply of, 'It's only a headache.' A long discussion latter, in which John used his superior MI-5 skills to wheedle as much information out of Harry as possible, the agent learned that a hidden world existed where magic was performed on a daily basis. He also learned that dragon's were real, and that his young laborer had an insane Dark Lord after him because of some prophecy. Pondering these facts for a moment, John realized there was only one thing he could do; he would have to help the boy. The MI-5 agent had taken numerous oaths that were designed to prevent exactly what he was about to do, train another person in classified ways, but sod it all, the boy was a good kid, and he needed help.

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Harry spent most of that summer talking to John about the rest of his past and training for the future. John was at first skeptical about the fact that a prophecy foretold Harry as the only one capable of killing Voldemort. He continually insisted that the future was not written in stone, and smacked Harry on the back of his head whenever he got too melancholy over the subject. John was not knowledgeable about Occlumency, but he did train Harry in the MI-5 ways to resist torture and mind programming, so while Harry never became an Occlumist, due in part to Snape's damaging lessons, he was able to defend his mind, to some extent, against Voldemort's nightly attacks.

When Harry did finally trust the retired agent enough to tell him the contents of the prophecy, and not just that one existed, John burst out laughing. After calming down enough to breathe again, he simply answered Harry's stare by saying, "Harry, the thing never says you have to kill him! The thing says you 'vanquish' him. If I understand the history you've told me right, you did that when you were a year old. Your mother used some unknown ritual on you to give you a 'power he knew not' and then you vanquished him. Vanquish-ment doesn't translate to death, it means you drove him off. Which you did. And being marked as his equal, well, the prophecy never elaborates on the part, it could just be a side effect of vanquishing him. Like I told you, son, the future is not written in stone. I don't care about any bleeding prophecy, anything that gets shot enough will die! You aren't the only one who can kill him!"

Needless to say, Harry felt much more positive about his future after that talk, especially when John somehow managed to get him two semi-automatic pistols. Although the prophecy might not apply anymore, Voldemort still thought it did, and while Harry might still be hunted by the Dark Lord and his minions, well, there's nothing that enough bullets can't fix.

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Harry's remaining years at Hogwarts were a little less happy then the first few, if you count going through numerous traps, fighting giant snakes, and being unwillingly entered into dangerous tournaments happy. He decided not to tell Ron and Hermione the prophecy, mainly because he knew Ron had jealousy issues and could in a moment of anger blurt it out for the world to know, and because Hermione would just start fawning over him in pity, and he really didn't want that. That decided, he became more and more estranged from his friends as he spent more and more of time in the Room of Requirement, practicing with different types of firearms and magic. John had set him the project of being able to wandlessly conjure his pistol and bullet cartridges, and while Harry didn't know the first thing about wandless magic, the Room of Requirement did, and so Harry was slowly putting himself towards this task.

Of course, Dumbledore had to go and die then. It was quite unfortunate, but at the same time liberating, because Harry no longer had to act the part of the Gryffindor Golden Boy. He could let loose the Slytherin side of himself that Sirius's death and John's training had developed.

Harry quickly acted the part of the depressed student grieving his mentor's death, and then had every member of the Order of the Phoenix dancing on their feet trying to get him out of his depression. Saying that all he wanted was to be left alone, the Order was only too happy to comply with his request in an effort to 'help him', and shut off most of their contact with him. The young wizard, using this opportunity, slipped out of his Dursley prison one night before slinking across the street to visit John. Voldemort was a menace, and as much as Harry didn't want to go fight, he knew no one else would, and so he said goodbye to his mentor before starting his quest.

Right up to the night of his death, Dumbledore had been showing Harry memories of Voldemort's younger life. Tom Riddle had achieved immortality by splitting his soul and anchoring it to objects here on earth. Although Harry thought it was a little to reminiscent of the old 'Lord of the Rings' books and the 'One Ring,' he had to admit it was an effect way to stopper death. Before he could destroy Voldemort, he would have to find and destroy his Horcruxes.

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Harry was interrupted from his musings by soft groan as his sleeping partner tightened her grip on him. Her blond hair was spread across the mattress and shimmered in the morning light. He smiled again as she settled back down into slumber.

He had found all the Horcruxes, thanks to the memories Dumbledore's left behind for him, and disposed of them in a way Tolkien would have approved of. Unlike the former headmaster, Harry didn't bother with complicated spells to strip away the soul from its container; he just took as small visit to Hawaii and dropped them in a newly formed lava flow.

After the prerequisites were over, Harry began his hunt for Voldemort. Putting his infiltration and assassination training to use, Harry executed more of the Dark Lord's army in several months than the ministry had in all the previous years that he was out searching for Voldemort's soul pieces. This, however, became somewhat of a double-edged sword, as although Voldemort virtually put a stop to his attacks, he also retreated into his headquarters, wherever that may be, as its location was protected by the Fidelius charm.

Harry, seeing only one way to confront his parent's murderer, let himself be captured by Death Eaters in an effort to meet Voldemort. Weeks later, and after many scarring torture sessions, Voldemort decided to grace his prisoner with his presence, but met the unexpected. Snapping out of the pain-suppressing mind-state that John taught Harry he quickly performed the only bit of wandless magic he knew. In what was somewhat of an anticlimactic final battle, Harry quickly gunned down Voldemort before continuing to purge out the remaining Death Eaters onsite.

His task complete, Harry went back to John's home, hoping to reunite with his mentor. However, he only returned to find an empty house and a gravestone.

And so here he was. Harry had no real friends left after the war, nothing to live for. He had become estranged from Ron and Hermione, for they were still relatively innocent while he was plagued by memories of the war. Moving away from England, Harry bought a small cabin in the States. Now living in Minnesota, he spent his days fishing, enjoying the closeness to nature, and intending to live the rest of his days in solitude.

Of course, he had never studied the mating patterns of Veela. How was he supposed to know that Veela, contrary to their popular reputation, chose only a single life-partner and were loyal to that individual forever? Evidently, saving a young Veela girl from the bottom of the lake left a big enough impression on her to make her want to mate herself to her hero. Having completed her schooling, Gabrielle Delacour, or after last night, maybe she would be better known as Gabrielle Potter, set out searching for Harry Potter. Last night she found him, and Harry wasn't dumb enough to ignore such a wonderful gift. He knew he was scarred, didn't understand the first thing about relationships, and that Gabrielle would probably be a lot better with someone else, but she had already chose him, and Veela mating was for life.

Harry was a beast, and Gabrielle was his beauty.


End file.
